I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Thursday, March 15, 2007

I remember thinking that underneath one's skin was a layer that was essentially a sheet of blood, like liquid trapped between two panes of glass. I thought that when you cut yourself you breached that area, and that the only difference between cuts was their depth and the amount of skin they opened. I think we learned about veins in third grade or so (arteries later). I remember I was in fifth grade when I scraped my wrist very slightly and worried about bleeding to death (since by then I knew that you could commit suicide by cutting your wrists), because Miss Brenner (after reassuring me that I was fine) told me very kindly about her brother who'd been bitten by a squirrel and was worried about rabies and getting rabies shots. In the end he didn't get them.

posted by william 10:58 PM
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